13 and 15 West 54th Street Houses

History and architecture

This handsome town house was built in 1896-97 as one of a pair with No. 15 West 54th Street for William Murray, a prominent businessman from Larchmont, New York. Designed in a Renaissance-inspired style by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, the residence is a distinguished example of the fashionable town houses that once characterized the West Fifties between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and is one of an ensemble of five town houses on West 54th Street.

Midtown Manhattan remained open farmland until the first half of the 19th century when shanty towns, rubbish dumps, stockyards, and factories began to appear above West 40th Street. The landscaping of Central Park, commenced in 1857, helped spur the development of Midtown, and during the building boom that followed the Civil War the West Forties and Fifties became lined with brick and stone residences. These new houses ranged from lavish Fifth Avenue mansions commissioned by such individual clients as the Vanderbilts to middle-class dwellings erected on a speculative basis.

The house at 13 West 54th Street occupies part of the original site of St. Lukes Hospital (1858), which fronted on West 55th Street at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue. The hospital dominated the east end of the block until new quarters were erected on Amsterdam Avenue at 113th Street in 1896. That same year construction began on Nos. 13 and 15, the first of several fashionable residences to be built on the north side of West 54th Street. Together with the University Club (a designated New York City Landmark), constructed at 1 West 54th Street in 1896-1900, they typify the fine turn-of-the-century residences and private clubs that transformed the Fifties near Fifth Avenue and Fifth Avenue itself into an exclusive neighborhood part of the continuing northward residential trend in Manhattan.

Many of the buildings were designed by New York's leading architects for the city's most prominent and affluent citizens.